Sheba

CHAPTER SIX
Western Arabia and the Sheba-Menelik Cycle
I
n western Arabia there is a wealth of evidence from trade routes, state
building processes, linguistics, place names, traditions, mineral deposits,
environmental change, archaeological sites, religious development, an
ancient Ark culture, and an extraordinary passage in the Sheba-Menelik
Cycle of the Kebra Nagast that indicate this area and not Palestine was the
true home of the Old Testament.
Today the inhabitants of Arabia are known collectively as Arabs,
although they have a mixed origin. According to their own traditions, the
Arabs are descended from two groups of peoples; a sedentary group in the
Yemen and nomads from the north central Arabian Desert. In the west and
south the population has a substantial African element, while the east has
admixtures from India and Persia. The earliest known languages of the
southwest were Sayhadic (Sabaean, Qatabanian, Hadramatic, Minaen).
Arabic developed among the desert nomadic pastoralists and today covers
all of Arabia except where about 200,000 people speak six non-mutually
intelligible non-Arabic languages 1 in the Yemen-Oman borderland, the
island of Socotra, and isolated pockets such as at Jebel Fayfa near Jizan on
the Saudi-Yemen border.
The language spoken in ancient western Arabia has puzzled linguists.
Arab traditions state that the western Arabians migrated northwards from
Yemen and tend to group them with Yemenis. However, western Arabian
has, in the words of Oxford University scholar Chaim Rabin, “surprising
similarities and parallelisms ... with Canaanite.” 2 Since Canaanite is
generally held to have had a Palestinian origin this does not seem to make
sense. Logically the western Arabians must have originated in the north and
migrated south, bringing their Canaanite language with them. Other
linguistic evidence will be forthcoming to show that it is more likely that